Oil Is Not a Curse

Pauline Jones Luong is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Brown University. Previously, she was an Assistant Professor at Yale University. At Harvard University, where she received her doctorate, she was an Academy Scholar from 1998 to 1999, and from 2001 to 2002. Her primary research interests are institutional origin and change, identity and conflict, and the political economy of development. Her empirical work to date has focused on the former Soviet Union. She has published articles in several leading academic and policy journals, including the American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, Current History, Foreign Affairs, Politics and Society and Resources Policy. Her books include Institutional Change and Political Continuity in Post-Soviet Central Asia and The Transformation of Central Asia. Funding from various sources has supported her research, including the National Science Foundation, the John T. and Catherine D. MacArthur Foundation, the National Council on East European and Eurasian Research, and the Smith Richardson Foundation. Erika Weinthal is Associate Professor of Environmental Policy at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. From 1998 to 2005, she taught in the Department of Political Science at Tel Aviv University. Her research focuses on environmental and natural resources policy in the former Soviet Union and the Middle East. She has published widely in journals such as Perspectives on Politics, Comparative Political Studies, the American Political Science Review, Foreign Affairs, Ground Water, Global Environmental Politics and the Journal of Environment and Development. She is the author of State Making and Environmental Cooperation: Linking Domestic Politics and International Politics in Central Asia. She has received funding from a variety of institutions to support her research, including the National Research Council for Europe and Eurasia, the United States Institute of Peace, the John T. and Catherine D. MacArthur Foundation, the Fifth Framework Programme of the European Union and the USDA. She is a member of the UNEP Expert Advisory Group on Environment, Conflict, and Peacebuilding.

• 1. Rethinking the resource curse: ownership structure and institutions in mineral rich states; 2. Fiscal regimes: taxation and expenditure in mineral rich states; 3. State ownership with control versus private domestic ownership; 4. Two version of rentierism: state ownership with control in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan; 5. Petroleum rents without rentierism: domestic private ownership in the Russian Federation; 6. State ownership without control versus private foreign ownership; 7. Eluding the obsolescing bargain: state ownership without control in Azerbaijan; 8. Revisiting the obsolescing bargain: foreign private ownership in Kazakhstan; 9. Taking domestic politics seriously: explaining ownership structure over mineral resources; 10. The myth of the resource curse.

'The author's concluding chapter makes a reasonably, if not overwhelmingly persuasive case about why the resource curse hypothesis is a myth.' Gaurav Sharma, oilholicssynonymous.com